5 definitions
by
Shaka Zulu

1. A reimplementation of the UNIX operating system kernel, written by Linus Torvalds, and distributed for free on the Internet. Linux has acheived remarkable compatibility with UNIX, from the point of view of a programmer compiling his software from the source code. Software originally written for UNIX can usually be compiled to run on Linux with no modifications. Linux binaries cannot run on UNIX systems that don't have Linux compatibility on purpose. Linux can be made to run binaries from SCO OpenServer via the Intel Binary Compatibility Standard (IBCS).

Linux is more compatible with UNIX systems that descend from UNIX System V than it is with BSD systems such as FreeBSD.

2. The Linux kernel, bundled with application programs like those that come with UNIX. When these applications are products of the Free Software Foundation, the combination is called GNU/Linux (the G in GNU is pronounced).

When the kernel is combined with applications, the result is called a Linux "distribution." Some distributions are commercially sold and have their own brand names.

3. A registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

4. A religion practiced largely on the USENET newsgroup comp.os.linux.advocacy. The primary ritual of Linux is arguing endlessly with one of two denominations of Linux practitioners: Linux advocates, and Windows advocates, over whether or not Linux is better than Microsoft Windows. The arguments that make up the ritual can be divided into five categories: Linux sucks, Linux rules, Windows sucks, Microsoft sucks and personal insults.

Linux practitioners are even more fervent than computer users who engage in other so-called "religious wars" such as the classic EMACS vs. Vi.

3. A registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Linux (the operating system) looks and feels very much like Sun Solaris, despite the fact that it is not based on the original UNIX kernel, and even its shell commands are complete rewrites of the originals.

GNOME, the graphical interface of Solaris, was written for Linux first.

Since its inception in 1991, Linux has become the most popular UNIX-like operating system, beating Solaris, and even UNIX-based Mac OS X.

1. Windows 1.0 was a graphical shell that allowed the user of an IBM PC to have several MS-DOS programs running at the same time, sharing the screen through viewports called "windows," hence the name. It was released after the first Apple Macintosh computer, and most users did not install it because it required too much memory. MS-DOS was an operating system that could only have one application open at any given time, and those applications could only access up to 640 kilobytes of RAM. Files stored by it had names consisting of eight characters, a dot, and three more characters, and certain characters, such as spaces, were not allowed. TEXTFILE.TXT was a typical DOS filename.

2. ~ 3.0 was a graphical shell that also had dynamic library support, a feature normally built into an operating system. Applications had to be written "for" ~, almost as if it was an operating system. It did things on behalf of applications, like an operating system. It was started from DOS as an application, and exiting ~ returned the user to DOS. Instead of folders, there were program groups, where programs had to be explicitly placed. Placement of a program in the Program Groups typically involved telling ~ the complete path to the program executable (ie, "C:\COREL\WP.EXE")

3. ~ 95 was a graphical shell that was booted directly by DOS, so that it appeared to be the entire operating system. It imitated the look and feel of a Macintosh. It was capable of running most ~ NT binaries, and it implemented pre-emptive multitasking, a feature commonly found in operating systems, and added support for "long filenames" (LFN), which allowed files to have Macintosh-like names. The "Restart in DOS mode" feature is equivalent to the "Exit Windows" feature in older versions of ~.

4. Windows NT ("New" Technology) is a real operating system that was written completely independantly of the line of graphical shells that are also called Windows. Microsoft hired the employees of DEC that designed VMS to work on ~ NT. Unlike ~ versions that were already on the market, ~ NT took full advantage of the Intel 386's 32-bit capabilities. Its design was so closely tied to the Intel 32-bit architecture that it could not be ported to a 64-bit platform easily.

The "New" technology in ~ was new only to Windows. Features new to NT, such as true multitasking and virtual memory, had been available in other operating systems since the 1970s and even before that.

Microsoft eventually began to market Windows NT as an alternative to UNIX, but they did so at the same time that Linux was becoming ever more popular as a UNIX replacement. Windows NT had many bugs of its own, and its superficial similarities to Windows 95 caused users to expect Windows 95 bugs to be present in Windows NT. Its Internet server offerings were notably inferior to the UNIX programs they were meant to replace.

All current versions of Windows are descended from Windows NT, and not from the DOS shells that were also called Windows.

Though 64-bit Intel processors are already available in 2004, a 64-bit version of Windows is still years away.

/dev/null is a character device file on UNIX computer operating systems that accepts all data written to it, without storing it. It can be opened by many processes simultaneously, and writing to it doesn't cause the file to grow. Formally, it's described as being an infinite data sink. In shell programming, unwanted output from a command can be redirected there. For example:

find / 2>/dev/null

This would display the full paths to all the accessible files on the computer, without displaying the "Permission denied" errors that are likely to occur.

When programs try to read from /dev/null, they get an end-of-file error.

The idea of a null device was imitated by Microsoft in MS-DOS. In DOS, 'NUL' is a reserved filename. When you open a file with that name, DOS opens its equivalent of /dev/null. This behavior was inherited by Windows. In Windows,
even versions of it that are based on the NT kernel, you cannot create a file called "NUL".

It is usually pronounced as "dev null", not "slash dev, slash null." Programmers sometimes refer to /dev/null as a place to send any unwanted information, even if, for example, the data is being transmitted as spoken words from a human's mouth.

"I didn't give a shit about what the Resident was saying, so I simply redirected everything he said to /dev/null."

A troll whose disruptive posts typically proclaim that Microsoft Windows is utterly superior to other operating systems (typically Linux), and that users of other operating systems like Linux are fanatics, lunatics, zealots, communists, anti-Americans, or hippies.

Wintrolls are most commonly found on the USENET newsgroup comp.os.linux.advocacy, where for years their mantra has been that Linux is "not ready for the desktop" user market segment, and that less than 1% of desktop users run Linux.

They are also found on urbandictionary.com, where they have been posting "definitions" of Linux that say only that it's "not ready for the desktop."